Highlighting the obtuse, the slanted and sometimes just plain ignorant writings found in The Gray Lady

Art

On April 12th 2017 they promoted a “controversial” story about the “Fearless Girl” statue on Wall Street and how it turned the sculptor of the Wall Street bull rather peevish.

It turned out to generate massive coverage and feedback from people all over the world.

Great, you might say?

Not so great, we say.

Why?

Because the “Fearless Girl” statue was commissioned by State Street Capitol Advisors – Who The New York Times took Big $ from for a Big Ad in their same day’s Business Section which just so happened to blare – get this – “Sometimes Shit Happens.”

Well, actually, the ad said – “Sometimes —– Happens.”

But why be coy when you’re in bed with The New York Times and promoting yourself by ludicrously tying your corporate profits onto the back of the Women’s Rights Movement?

Talk about shame.

Shame on The New York Times.

Shame on State Street Capitol Advisors.

Shame on all those who got suckered into this false “discussion” of “Fearless Girl” when the real issue is about two corporations making a tempest in a teapot in order to generate corporate profits.

For 2 weeks Bob Dylan has been silent about his Nobel Prize win for Literature.

And The New York Times has been on a hate parade about it.

Ever since the Swedish Academy announced 2 weeks ago it was awarding Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature, The New York Times has been tying itself up in politically correct conniption fits.

The Times has been spinning the news in their own way: That Dylan’s silence over the matter somehow shows ungratefulness. Worse, The Times’ implication has for 2 weeks been that the Nobel Prize for Literature rather should go to some unknown (unworthy) who would therefore be thrust into the world’s spotlight to illuminate this or that passing cause to us unlearned masses.

They even published an opinion piece: “Why Bob Dylan Shouldn’t Have Gotten A Nobel”

Read it. It says, in part, the Nobel committee should have given the award to an “underrepresented” group, or for example, an “online” writer.

(Note to Times: These are the types of articles that turn people into Trumpsters.)

You mean, someone irrelevant. Someone who hasn’t changed millions of lives or made countless impacts across all spectrums of peoples and races across the world? Dylan’s music still inspires millions of fans and wannabe musicians.

The Nobel Prize was first awarded over a century ago and was given for a writer’s body of work over their lifetime.

The Nobel is not – as The Times and other Politically Correct Revisionists would have it – an award given to push this year’s favorite cause celebre’.

Anyone – anyone – who knows Dylan’s work knows the great influence books and literature had on him as a lyricist and comprehends how much he deserves this Nobel award – No matter the unconventional, out-of-left-field manner in which it came about.

Anyone who knows Bob Dylan knows the impact his work has had across the world: In politics, film, literature, art, fashion and music.

Organizations like The New York Times with their blindered writers and editorial boards can go back to Youtube or somewhere else and watch that singular event in July 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan shocked audiences with his messy, raucous electric performance of “Like A Rolling Stone” and changed the face of rock and roll forever.

That’s what artists do. They shake things up. They do the unexpected. They do NOT conform to the standards that the media or business demands from them. And that it what Bob Dylan has been doing for over 50 years as an artist.

And if The New York Times doesn’t like it, they can write their own protest song.

Not since John Wayne paraded through 1968’s “The Green Berets” has a Hollywood star fired off such a tone deaf, sickening film as Tina Fey’s “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.”

In Tina Fey’s Beverly Hills perspective the atrocities of the Afghan War are just ripe for her to go romping through in a self-realization comedy – Oh, all those kids blown up? Women raped, burned for attempting to go to school? Massive deaths from car bombs STILL taking place nearly every day?

Tina Fey, from her comfortable mansion, thinks she can joke about that because heck, laughs make the world go round.

Go to some to funerals in Kabul, Fey, and crack some jokes. See if that makes the surviving family members feel better. We know it’ll break up your filthy rich insulated Hollywood friends.

For some outrageous quotes from the out-of-touch Hollywood types read the LA Times piece:

Fey: “If you look back at an earlier generation…it would be okay to laugh at this experience.” Hey, Fey. Afghans are dying every day right now. Is THAT funny?

The writers have the gall to compare “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” to such “comedies” as Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.” Even Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

Vonnegut, if you don’t know, was a young prisoner of war in Dresden during WWII. Taken underground into “Slaughterhouse-Five” with other prisoners during an Allied incendiary bombing raid on Dresden they came out to find the city burned down and 25,ooo citizens burned along with it. Vonnegut and his fellow US prisoners of war were forced by their German captors into the stench of a city of burned human flesh to bury the corpses.

Yes, he wrote a powerful novel from these experiences. And it was novel that came from a place of such personal horrors of the war experience that Vonnegut mastered an absurdist humor that can only come from deep loss.

***

Clueless, pretentious people like Tina Fey are crap on soles of those who have truly walked and suffered through the horrors of war.

No, it has nothing to do with that whole media hubbub about the nomination process.

Like we’ve mentioned before: The President of The Academy is a black woman. How racist can they be?

***

This is about how wrong the media can be. And how we made money from it.

Like many in the world, we enjoy a good wager. And when we saw that the odds for Best Supporting Actor were screaming that Sylvester Stallone was a sure winner, well…we knew better. We took the long odds and went with the best acting job we’d seen all year: Mark Rylance in “Bridge Of Spies.”

Rylance got the Oscar. We cleaned up.

Rylance’s wasn’t a showy performance. In fact, he practically disappeared into his character. So much so that you couldn’t keep your eyes off him.

Rylance is British, from the stage and well known for his chops. He’s currently onstage in New York now. When “Bridge Of Spies” came out his performance was singled out in most reviews.

Yet, somehow, in the media’s “we-only-care-for-what’s-in-front-of-us-not-what’s-in-our-rear-view-mirror” attitude, every article prior to the Oscars touted Stallone as the overwhelming favorite.

Why? Because he’s a sympathetic old white guy? Because like lots of old Hollywood types he’s hyped on steroids and HGH (except Sly got busted for bringing HGH into Australia back in 2007)?

Thanks, exemplary Editor Dean Baquet and Publisher Art O. Sulzberger, the lesser. You are reaching lower and lower for some mythical mass readership that exists only in that special bond that exists in your co-mingling frat-bro minds.

And given the devolved state of taste prevelant today in tastemakers, it’s no surprise the logo basically stinks. Reductive, simplistic, in screaming horror-show red and meant to appeal to…well, those hordes with faces stuck perpetually in their smartphones.

What’s even more telling: The one quote Pogrebin finds in defense of the logo comes from that city that is the bastion of good taste, LA.

One graphic designer named Dylan C. Lathrop is quoted as saying the logo is “cool!”

And then, as if we needed more evidence of Dylan’s teenage mentality, he/she goes on to belittle “haters” of the new logo. Yes. Pulling out the middle-schooler’s logic-defying term “hater” that immediately, in their minds, ends all arguments in their favor.

And putting the cherry on top, Dylan ends with another teen dismissive, “whatever.”

Well, we think THE MET’s new logo has found THE MET’s new target audience.